IT Graduates Not "Well-Trained, Ready-To-Go" 609
coondoggie writes "There is a disconnect between students getting high-tech degrees and what employers are looking for in those graduates. Employers agree that colleges and universities need to provide their students with the essential skills required to run IT departments, yet only 8% of hiring managers would rate IT graduates hired as 'well-trained, ready-to-go,' according to a survey of 376 organizations that are members of the IBM user group Share and Database Trends and Applications subscribers."
It's Called 'Experience'! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's Called 'Experience'! (Score:5, Insightful)
Most IT hiring requires experience! Noobs are OK for some stuff but there's no way for any school to train them for what everyone in the real world is looking for ('cuz we all want something different).
Though everyone always told me that unless you went to school you'd never amount to anything and that you'd be a failure forever. No one could ever learn things they needed to know without college! Amassing huge amounts of debt in school I was told always was the most important goal of anyone looking to start a career!
Now you tell me that people want real world experience too?
Let me tell you something, that degree is just important or you'll end up like me. I have years of experience, tons of certifications but since I don't have a degree no one will hire me and I can't get promoted if I do find a job. Yeah people might not have experience once finishing school but as far as corporate politics and HR B.S. go it is the most important part for expanding your career.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
If that's the case, you're not doing it right.
I only have a high school diploma, and a bunch of odd classes here and there. I also have a near-six-figure job doing what I love in the IT field, and have people under me.
The secret is not that a degree will get you where you want to go. I know a lot of people who have advanced degrees, but are still stuck in lower-level jobs.
The secret is to become cultured, know how to interact with people who have degrees, have an actual vocabulary, know how to write well, k
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
In other words, you are incompetent bottom-level manager with ridiculously inflated ego.
Re:It's Called 'Experience'! (Score:4, Informative)
In other words, you are incompetent bottom-level manager with ridiculously inflated ego.
Why that may well be the case with the above poster, I'm still going to have to agree with the "you're doing it wrong" part.
The OP said they have "years of experience" yet can't find a job and when they do have a job, they can't get promoted. If that is indeed the case I don't know that a college degree would help. There are literally a ton of jobs out there right now for people who can actually write code, and except for perhaps the gov't and maybe a few giant corporations, a degree isn't a firm requirement.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:It's Called 'Experience'! (Score:5, Interesting)
Wholeheartedly agree.. Not long ago, I had to call the HR department out in a serious fashion. I was recruiting for a couple of Developers.. HR field the CVs, and pass them on. I ended up with a pile, and in that pile were just a couple that looked vaguely interesting, but on interview turned out not to have the goods. Shortly afterwards, I got a few calls from candidates who were asking if their applications had been received (which to me, they hadn't, and over the phone, they seemed pretty good fits).. I went and asked HR where these applications were, and was told that they'd been 'Pre-Filtered' through HR's own internal process for applicability for the role. After yanking out the ones they'd 'filtered out', I discovered several that were pretty much an exact fit. HR just didn't know the words that actually said what the experience was, so discounted them entirely, rather than leave the judgement call to someone who knew what was going on.
Needless to say, I hit the roof with them for wasting my time. I went on to hire a couple of those that HR had rejected.
Re: (Score:3)
I think the current situation is that HR is overwhelmed. Partly due to the current recession and associated unemployment, but mostly due to the rise of online applications. Applying for a job used to take an hour at least filling in forms, and now it's five minutes to print out your standard application letter - or five seconds to cli
Re: (Score:3)
Re:It's Called 'Experience'! (Score:4, Insightful)
I think the current situation is that HR is overwhelmed. Partly due to the current recession and associated unemployment, but mostly due to the rise of online applications.
No. It predates that.
I once applied for a job at one of the Energy Department's national labs, and was very pleased to be called in for an in-person interview. I didn't get the job, but they were very courteous and seemed pleased enough with me, and a real-life HR person even phoned me to let me know I wouldn't be getting the job, but thanking me for my time and encouraging me to keep applying if I saw positions that interested me. (When's the last time that happened?)
What they told me during the interview, though, was that posting the job on Craigslist (where I saw it) was a first for them. As a government agency, they tended to adopt new technologies for procedural things rather slowly. They also told me they probably wouldn't be posting jobs there again. Within 24 hours of posting the listing, my interviewer said, they had about 200 applications in hand. In the end, of those, there were maybe 3-4 that they felt were worth calling for an interview, of which I was one.
Sure, I was flattered. But I also knew I wasn't a perfect fit for this job, either. It wasn't quite the same thing I had been doing before, but I was enthusiastic about the opportunity and was willing to be flexible. So I asked them -- in one of those "do you have any questions to ask us?" interview moments -- what was it about the other 196 applicants that had ruled them out? What, typically, had been a red flag for them?
The interviewer said it wasn't really anything like that. Quite frankly, the vast majority of the applicants had no business applying for this job anyway. Some were fresh out of college, with no experience whatsoever and no hint of what might make them a good fit for this particular position. Others had experience in seemingly unrelated areas -- a lot of generic business managers, and even some with mainly restaurant experience. Some had a poor grasp of English. A lot of them just seemed like cookie-cutter, form letter applications. One thing I always do when applying for a job is try to attach a cover letter with my resume to explain what it is about the opportunity that appeals to me; apparently, most people don't even do that. So in the end, they were left sifting through this big stack of paper, most of which looked like garbage to them. It was like coming back from a long vacation and having to sift through all the junk mail in your mailbox, to make sure you don't throw away any paychecks.
But if you read through all that hoping to find my explanation, unfortunately I have none. It makes some sense to me to apply for a job you're not fully qualified for -- how else do you grow? But to apply for a job you don't even really want doesn't make much sense to me. I've even walked out of in-person interviews convinced I won't take the job if they call me back. Life's too short. Similarly, to apply for a job that you do want but to not even really try -- not even bothering to tweak your resume so it lists a few of the asked-for skills? What's up with that?
Re:It's Called 'Experience'! (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm a senior developer at one of the world's biggest software companies. The only reason I didn't move to management is because I want to continue writing code. I dropped out of college in the middle of my second year.
A degree certainly helps you get a job, and skips you past a few of the bottom rungs, but after a certain point talent and experience are all that matters. Its true that without a degree I had to work my way from tech support -> sysadmin -> software qa -> software development, and my friends who stuck with schol went straight to software development. However when I finally got to write code for a living I was already considered mid-level, and they were junior devs, and now ten years into the field we're all about at the same place.
Maybe my path wouldn't work for most people, but "you will die penniless and alone if you don't go to college" scare tactics just annoy me.
You make excellent points. (Score:4, Insightful)
The key factor (imo) is whether are self-motivated enough to learn the college level material on your own.
I'd still recommend a degree. But only because it makes some of the future steps easier. But get the cheapest, fastest degree you can find. Any degree. You can improve it later.
20 years down the road, you have 19 years of experience in "IT" (13 years writing code professionally) and the people who went to college have 16 years experience in "IT" (16 years writing code professionally).
The difference will not be with the groups. It will be with the individuals who push themselves to learn more and to do more.
Re: (Score:3)
Well... College can also offer learning and experience opportunities that may be difficult to come by on your own or at your job. One of the reasons my first employer gave for hiring me was my unusual college work.
For example, for my last two years of undergrad '85-87, I was a - paid - research assistant doing work on automated programming techniques in LISP on a $40k Xerox Dandelion workstation. I also did work o
Re: (Score:3)
Thank you sir for that insight. The takeaway of this whole discussion is that the key to job security is a four digit slashdot ID.
Re: (Score:3)
The main lure of government jobs is stability. If you work in government (state/local government especially) and you're union, you have near guaranteed job security, to the point that many politicians will actually sacrifice the well-being of everyone else just to please your union if they have to.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:It's Called 'Experience'! (Score:5, Insightful)
I hate to break it to you, but in my experience as a software engineer, most American companies are shitty in many ways. My determination of this has nothing to do with degrees (I have one), but the way the company is managed overall. Most American companies these days are all about cutting costs in stupid ways to create better quarterly results so their CEOs can get big bonuses, while putting the company further and further into debt. One of my former coworkers at Freescale told me recently that they sold off all their buildings recently and leased them back, so they could generate more cash which they could give to their owner (Blackstone) before they're spun off in an IPO to unwitting investors. I doubt Freescale will be around in 5 years. This is the same company that invested tons of money in a GPON chip, then when the first revision powered up successfully, they laid off the entire design team with the idea of having an Indian team do the support work. Then it turned out the chip was full of bugs and there was no one available to fix them (the Indian team declined the work).
Re: (Score:3)
to be fair - the sale and lease trick is a tax dodge. The money you pay in rent can be deducted from profits, so you pay less tax. The money you get from the sale is a one-off addition to the balance sheet and is usually spent.. on bonuses or share buybacks or similar.
Still, the cost-cutting and treating employees as interchangeable work-drones is destroying much of the economy.
Re:It's Called 'Experience'! (Score:5, Interesting)
It is actually more complicated than that. Any company should be ideally run as three companies. Company 1 owns all the capital assets plus pays management, company 2 the business contracts and company 3 manages and pays the staff. Company 2 is the company that actually trades, and rents the assets and contracts management from company 1 and contracts the staff from company 3 which also contracts management from company 1.
You should be able to guess why it is structured in that manner. If contracts go bad, company 2 goes bankrupt but all of the assets are retained in company 1. Company 3 is kept in survival mode only, barely able to meet current employee contractual conditions let alone long term ones, those unpaid long term obligations actually become a bonus for company 1 when all the staff are dumped. All profits are constantly siphoned off from company 2 and 3, in building rentals and management fees so if anything goes wrong the companies are simply wound up with minimum loses to management. Sometimes (far to often) management just let's debt build up in company 2 and 3 until they collapse and then walks away with all the profits in company 1. Interesting side note, if the employees are unionised, the union has the funds to pursue company 1 to recover the employees lost pay, no union and the employees are screwed (mortgages and credit cards ensure they have no means to pursue company 1), another reason why companies hate unions.
Back on topic there is a major difference between trade schools and universities. If you want staff you can immediately employ trade schools are the only way to go. If you want employees with a broad knowledge and research skills, that you need to train, universities are the way to go. If you want the best employee pick the ones who do both in either order, university and trade schools for certification.
Re:It's Called 'Experience'! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:It's Called 'Experience'! (Score:5, Insightful)
I hate to break it to you, but in my experience as a software engineer, most American companies are shitty in many ways.
To be exact, most publicly traded companies anywhere are shitty. There is no arguing that corporate psychopaths have swamped the ranks of executives of publicly traded companies, and care nothing for the long term viability and health of the company or the well-being of the employees.
In private companies, things are different, because the owner cares of what the heck is going on in his/her company, and would tighten the screws on any management that is not in the actual best interest of the firm. Owners want their companies to last long and not just till the end of the fiscal year.
Re: (Score:3)
In private companies, things are different, because the owner cares of what the heck is going on in his/her company, and would tighten the screws on any management that is not in the actual best interest of the firm. Owners want their companies to last long and not just till the end of the fiscal year.
You'd think that. From experience: that only holds true as long as the owner isn't trying to sell the company before the end of the fiscal year. :p
Re:It's Called 'Experience'! (Score:5, Informative)
This is just one small example of Greenspan's real mistake. Yes. His real mistake.
He stated that a belief that firms would act rationally was his mistake.
Rational actors are a funamental assumption of economic analysis, and all but the most blindered ivory-tower economists recognize that as a funametal flaw in the discipline. Recently, some experimental economics that pulls in the discipline of psychology has been done, so there's hope despite academia's tendancy to resist interdisciplinary study.
Anyway, I digress. Greenspan's real mistake was to buy into the fiction of corporate personhood.
Corporations don't act. They aren't persons. Employees and managers act, usually in their own self interest. Thus, the managers acting in their own self interest destroyed the firms and profited while doing so. As a collection of people all seeking their own self-interest, the firm serves the individuals that run it; but ultimately the firm itself becomes insolvent!
Re: (Score:3)
To argue we aren't rational is to contradict yourself(for why would you attempt to convince someone through discussion if they weren't capable of reason?).
I know plenty of people who can balance a checkbook, yet still they believe in astrology. The part of their head that balances the checkbook is rational and, IMHO, the part the believes in astrology isn't. Taken in whole they are not rational, since there is a part of them that isn't rational. Now, the actual balancing of the checkbook is rational,
Re: (Score:3)
I disagree. In my experience, most American companies are very poorly managed. They have executives who do the exact same kind of stupid, short-sighted decisions that Freescale did. The only company I've seen close-up which had anything close to decent management was Intel, and even they've made some huge blunders (RAMBUS, P4/Netburst, etc.), mostly under Craig Barrett's watch (Otellini has done a much better job).
Re: (Score:3)
If years of experience and those goddamned certifications aren't opening any doors for you, I hate to say it but maybe you're relying on those too much. I'm no better, but I do know that scoring cool jobs and promotions is about 20% effort, 80% networking. Sure, that 20% has to be good enough to leave a positive impression on the manager who will help you get that job or promotion, but if your people skills are lacking you won't get anywhere.
Alternately, if you think you're worth more than you earn, try b
Re:It's Called 'Experience'! (Score:4, Interesting)
That's definitely an issue. A shocking number of employers want to have a person with both a degree and experience, but good luck getting experience without having to volunteer. If you look at the job postings for jobs it's more or less impossible to find any that are listed without requiring several years of relevant experience.
It's also a compelling reason not to have work study positions in college. I remember when I was in college virtually all the jobs on campus were exclusives for work study students, and it was in the middle of nowhere so good luck getting a job off campus without a car, at which point you'd have to work a ton of hours just to be able to afford to work. But, without a job during the school year, it's that much harder to get the experience needed to be able to land a job after college without volunteering. Which if you didn't have extensive financial aid you probably can't afford to do anyways.
Re:It's Called 'Experience'! (Score:4, Insightful)
Honestly, I have been completely passed by, because I don't have a degree. Having a degree in the IT field helps a lot. I have 16 years experience so that gives me MAJOR advantages over those just coming out of college. I am going to school now, part time to get my degree. When I get out, I will have over 20 years experience AND an IT degree. It is kind of the best of both worlds. I also know of at least one guy that is a very brilliant programmer that almost got let go from a company that was reorganizing, just because he didn't have a degree. A LOT of his co-workers lobbied to keep him on.
A degree gives you upwards mobility. That is pretty much it. It also lets you get your foot in the door. Everything else in the middle is up to who YOU are.
Pot-kettle black (Score:5, Insightful)
yet only 8% of hiring managers would rate IT graduates hired as 'well-trained, ready-to-go,'
I would rate only 8% of managers as having the skill to deduce what they are hiring.
Re:It's Called 'Experience'! (Score:4, Insightful)
Yet, companies want to pay graduate prices (at best) for people with 5+ years of experience. Not only do they want experience, they want experience in the exact same technologies they're using - everything is extraneous. They may even be perfectly experienced in the desired skills and not be considered a 'good candidate' because they've got a degree in something tangential/unrelated, or have a couple years of experience doing something not quite the same.
The simple fact is, IT folks are considered an unwanted expense 9 times out of 10. (Thus the rise of MSPs and contractors continues - companies would rather pay by the hour or for a quantifiable checklist - even if they don't check it - than hire someone to do the same job.)
It comes down to companies not knowing shit about IT. Maybe it's our fault for pushing these 'wonder technologies' over the years, giving the illusion of 'it just works', or maybe it's vendors selling the latest-greatest wiz-bang with false pretenses, but the end result hurts everyone (companies included).
Re:It's Called 'Experience'! (Score:4, Insightful)
The real problem is that the employers don't know what they want. If they articulated it in a consistent manner, someone would fulfill that need. However, they want "experience" without explaining what experience is the valuable part. Do they want someone who knows how to do things, but possibly not necessarily the details so that those would be taught on the job? Or do they want tech-school graduates, not college graduates? Note in the summary they are talking about "running" IT departments. Apparently, the colleges or the employers think that a simple 4-year degree should be sufficient to be CIO. I wouldn't disagree with the point that sufficient education should be able to substitute for experience (not that I'm asserting that "sufficient" education is common or available), but to actually run a department takes a lot of business classes that aren't covered in IT degrees.
Not that learning the difference between an "expense" and a "capital expenditure" is difficult, but that if someone doesn't understand the difference, it is very hard to make an accurate budget or stick to it. Ever seen someone run a profitable business into bankruptcy? I have, multiple times. If they'd had a business class, they'd have known the difference between cashflow and profit and would have been able to see it coming, even if they couldn't prevent it. Additionally, you need precious little in technical skills to "run" and IT department. All you need is a well developed "tech BS" meter to ward off snake oil salesmen and lazy primadonnas who permeate the industry and managerial skills. The CIO isn't asked to code or install a firewall.
So it comes back to industry. They actually want the education system to fail because then they can point to deficiencies to justify low salaries, outsourcing, H1-Bs and such. If the industry had a consistent and articulated definition of what they wanted from a graduate, they'd have millions of them lined up. They obviously don't actually want that, or else they'd do it. So we are left with what industry wants, even if they then say it isn't what they want. But then, confusion benefits them, so why would they want to fix it?
Re: (Score:3)
Or, to turn
Re:It's Called 'Experience'! (Score:5, Insightful)
I was "well trained, ready to go" right out of college, no thanks to my formal education. My degree is merely something that makes employers think I know what I'm doing. My time playing around with stuff is why I actually know what I'm doing.
Re: (Score:2)
Each company has 50 million different combinations of programs and programming languages. They should be looking for someone with a solid understanding of object oriented design, UML, database design, etc. Those are the things my school taught me in the limited time they had.
Congratulations! You know nothing but flavor-of-the-week "technologies" that are actually products and acts of windbaggery.
Re: (Score:3)
That's all well and good for you, but how do those noobs acquire any experience if everybody in the industry follows your logic? And that's hardly an idle question: at least in my area, you'd probably have a better chance of getting hired with a felony conviction on your record than having no experience because you just graduated.
You are absolutely right. When I was starting out (30 years ago) I went to a small programming & accounting school in a strip mall. It had a PDP 11 and a few of these new fangled 'PCs'. We learned how to program in a handful of languages, manage green-screen real estate and do accounting. My first computer job had nothing to do with programming but fortunately I was considered 'knowledgable enough' about computers to be trained to do it.
Today's expectations are very different. Most employers don't wa
Re: (Score:3)
It's a good disconnect (Score:5, Insightful)
A degree is not a job training course.
End of.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
I don't know about your IT related degree, but there was one thing I did not learn at the university but is an integral part of every job I had so far: Programming. It was a requirement that you already KNEW programming to get anywhere.
Now, what did I learn there? A lot of theory behind programming, a lot in algorithm development, how to determine what tells a good algo from a bad one, how to determine the "cost" of an algo, in short, how to be a "better" programmer.
But that's not what is required in 99% of
Re:It's a good disconnect (Score:5, Insightful)
I would not expect someone getting a computer science degree to take a course on writing functional specifications or using bugzilla and Eclipse, just like I would not expect a medical doctor to take a course on filling out patient charts.
These are things you learn ON THE JOB. Lawyers clerk, doctors have residency. Heck even McDonalds employees have WEEKS of training. I don't understand why people think someone can graduate from computer science and instantly integrate into a workplace and start coding, it is ridiculous.
Re: (Score:3)
You obviously have not seen what the colleges/universities spit out as "ready for market educated individuals". An CS major has to* be able to create software. PERIOD!
That is just not what colleges/universities deliver. These kids don't know what is a functional specific
Re: (Score:3)
A university's job is not to "spit out" "ready for market" individuals whatever the hell that means.
A university's job is to educate someone in the field of computer science so that when they are trying to write an application they know WTF they are actually doing, as opposed to some graduate from a tech school who can whip together a VB7 app but doesn't know what a Thread even is let alone how to properly mutex.
You want people "ready for market", hire from a technical school. But don't come crying to me w
Re: (Score:3)
Yes, I'm sure that will look lovely at the department report: we failed to turn a profit, but we know the different between a vector and a list.
Dude, seriously. No one in management cares. If you get the job done, they don't care if you used a vector, a list, a table or a lookup. They don't care if you are using threading or IPC, or if your threading is POSIX compliant or not. Get the f'ing job done, quick and out of the door before the competition does. If you can manage to save us some money, you might ev
Re:It's a good disconnect (Score:5, Insightful)
Agreed. There is a world of difference between an academic qualification and a "vocational" qualification. The former is "education", the latter is "training".
When industry calls for specific skills, they are demanding that education be replaced with training. Nope, sorry. Academic study is too expensive to be used as a glorified training course. Remember that training can become obsolete. Training has to be renewed and revisited. Let's not confuse the two.
Re: (Score:3)
A degree is not a job training course.
End of.
But IT employers want it to be. The disconnect is decades old.
Re: (Score:2)
It is a university's responsibility to educate its students; students are expected to learn critical thinking and creative expression. Above all, students learn the discipline needed to dig into a subject, become knowledgeable about it, and apply its principles. It is not the responsibility of universities to crank out J2EE or SAP experts. That is the responsibility of employers and employees, or of trade schools.
Re: (Score:2)
On the same note, the amount of in-house training I have to give the new fresh-out-of-college people I hire is EXACTLY the same I have to give to highschool-only people.
God bless technical school, who give their students a good mix of technical knowledge, workplace procedures, laboratory experience, generic knowledge and common sense.
The ivory tower model of colleges should be taken down with extreme prejudice. It is harmful both for the student (when they try to place themselves in the job market) and to t
Re:It's a good disconnect (Score:5, Insightful)
God bless technical school, who give their students a good mix of technical knowledge, workplace procedures, laboratory experience, generic knowledge and common sense
Good for you. I'm glad you're one of the three employers not demanding a Bachelor's or Master's degree for every job position.
Most of all, they are looking for people who don't have that damn college mentality. THAT is the real barrier.
Then they should stop demanding college degrees, and stop giving excuses for why they want a college degree but they don't want college educated students.
Re:It's a good disconnect (Score:4, Interesting)
Sound advice. The requirements you listed are pretty universal throughout the job market, no matter what the industry. However, the issue here is that employers are looking seemless transition from school to work. This is a somewhat unreasonable desire because the people who have the characteristics you list probably could find work without additional education. That leaves everybody else. If you ran a school, could you practically train everyone for all the junior level opportunities offered? Probably not, as the job market is too diverse.
We could argue about the educational process but for me it boils down to the tortoise/hare race. Educating students on technical specifics works well in the short run but has limited shelf life. Educating on generalities lasts a life time. It is up to the student to transfer the generalities to specifics. Those who do that, do well. Ever wonder why those with degrees form the minority of the workforce but run the majority of companies? The degree must be adding value somewhere.
Re:It's a good disconnect (Score:4, Informative)
Several countries are starting to see that, and investing heavily on it (Brazil, Germany etc).
Your way to put it looks to me as if you don't really know how it works, at least in Germany. Because "starting to see it" points to a 1000 year old tradition. If Egypt or China call that "starting to see it", maybe one could agree, because they have a long enough tradition themselves. The main difference to the U.S. to me seems to be that the companies in Germany are responsible to train their futural workforce.
Germany has something that is called duales Bildungssystem (dual education system), where companies educate their futural employees in cooperation with the Berufsschulen (trade schools). For two to three years, depending on the profession, the pupils are working parttime at the company and are being educated in the school. After that the companies offer some of them working contracts, others are looking somewhere else for a job. Companies that are not training their own workforce will save money in the short run, but to them only the leftovers of the workforce are available. Thus about 50-60% of the workforce are trained.
Then there are the Universities of Applied Science (formerly known as Fachhochschulen), which are directed towards higher education, but are still strongly connected to the futural employers. They offer a very market oriented curriculum, train on and for industry standard products. A student at a University of Applied Science will work on his final thesis while being on a project at a company. So for at least half a year he is already part of the workforce before graduating. Also in this case the education is at least partly done within the industry (and paid for directly by the industry).
The school-only education you find only in the lowest 10% education level -- pupils who left school without finding someone willing to take them for the two or three year training, but have still to fulfill their legally required 10 to 12 years (depending on the state) school education and are thus going to a professional college -- and in the highest 20% of the education level, which are the ivory tower university courses.
So differently than in the U.S., the german companies are expected to train their futural employees. The U.S. companies are looking to me like lazy cats, unwilling to invest in people and complaining that the workforce supermarket doesn't offer the exact skillset they are looking for.
Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Since when did employers expect college grads to be "ready to go?" The skills they say they want are taught in college, but are pure speculation until applied in a meaningful way. Maybe that is a cry for more/better internship programs.
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Rhetorically, though, there is absolutely nothing for them to lose by taking this public stance. Who wants to go to the trouble of training employees if one can convince colleges and universities to train them for you at some mixture of individual, state, and parental expense? Training them yourself costs money, and means that you can't just flush them down the toilet and find a new one at a moment's notice...
That is why I find these articles(and they seem to pop up as regularly as the seasons) so infuriating. They are partly written by half-wits who don't understand that universities have a job to be doing that isn't "EZ-Training-while-U-Wait" and partially written by business lobby types who know exactly what the score is; but see nothing to lose in trying to externalize the costs of training their expendable peons.
Re: (Score:2)
University gives you critical thinking skills. It gives you a broad knowledge that has applicability beyond your job. However, However, I do understand what this employer means, but University will never be the environment to churn out ready to go developers. What is needed is an apprenticeships where those new to development are taken under the wing of an experienced developer.
Re: (Score:3)
There has to be a better way of educating people than making them do yet another 2 or 4 years and become a slave to their job due to their university debt.
Who's suprised? (Score:5, Insightful)
I attended a talk by an aerospace engineer and one of the first thing he realized about his first job is he didn't really know anything. His courses were merely a foundation for the rest of his career. It is this way in any technical field.
Re:Who's suprised? (Score:5, Interesting)
Remember:
1) you get a BA/BS and you think you know something
2) you get a MS/MA and realize you know nothing
3) you get a PhD and realize that nobody else knows anything either -- and it's all ok; we shall muddle on together.
I fail to see why business should expect new graduates to be ready to work; at best when I review resumes I'm looking for someone who's ready to learn with solid abilities to analyze problems. A spark of creativity is a bonus too.
I am not sure who these people are (Score:4, Insightful)
I suspect bean counting HR types are driving the data. They are seldom technically proficient enough
to have a clue.
Getting IT people with decent job history and programmers with the same is not going to
happen for $20.00 per hour or 40 K per year.
Of course graduates lack what IT managers want (Score:5, Interesting)
No one ever graduated with the wide range of expert-level skills and the absurd amount of experience required. IT employers want candidates to know everything under the sun, and to have known those skills at least since they were created. For example, I remember seeing a job post 10 years ago that required 20 years of Java... do the math.
IT managers need to get real. The chances that they'll actually find a candidate with real expertise in PHP, RoR, Python, MySQL, Oracle, Apache, Cisco, JavaScript, jQuery, UI/UX, Photoshop, and Flash is pretty slim (yes, I saw that just the other day).
Alternate reality requirements (Score:5, Insightful)
I remember seeing a job post 10 years ago that required 20 years of Java... do the math.
Once upon a time (1981) my then employer advertised for a programmer with five years of experience in 8088 (not 8086) assembly code. I pointed out that they were effectively screening out honest applicants, but they ran the ad that way anyhow.
Events proved me right.
Re: (Score:2)
IT employers want candidates to know everything under the sun, and to have known those skills at least since they were created.
Not only IT employers; it is interesting though if you have a look at the products created by all these geniuses or if you are unlucky enough to have to communicate with one.
CC.
Re: (Score:2)
Nonsense, they've got 15 resumes for consultants at Wipro and Infosys with exactly that...
Re: (Score:2)
Replace "IT" in your sentences with "HR", and you'd have a bit more accuracy. ;)
Having done a lot of hiring recently, with sane requirements, I have found it tough going sometimes to find the right candidate. Sure, there were folks with tons of experience. There were folks with amazing degrees. The problem is, there was too much missing in the ability and initiative department. I need folks who are able to hit the ground running (we're kind of lean, and babysitting only makes things tougher - and I know I'm
Re:Of course graduates lack what IT managers want (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
To use the car analogy, it would be like posting an auto mechanic position that specif
Re:Of course graduates lack what IT managers want (Score:5, Insightful)
You need Cisco, Photoshop, and Flash to do a Joomla installation?
A better analogy than you think. Most mechanics will have no experience with upholstery besides sitting on it. Transmissions are also typically done by people who specialize in them. A mechanic's experience with stereos will likely be limited to removing and reinstalling them to get at something else. And they may not do air conditioning, though that's less common nowadays.
Re: (Score:3)
Their logic is simple: We'll expect the impossible, some people will apply with a subset thereof and we'll pick and choose who we want. That way, the best will apply and we'll simply take the one that has the most of the skills we require.
What they usually fail to see is that such people are rare, and they also rarely have a problem finding a new job if they are not treated well. They're not as easy to retain as a "normal" programmer.
Re: (Score:3)
The disconnect happens at both ends. I'm currently looking to hire (NYC, relatively junior position, general unix skills strongly preferred, perl also preferred but not required, what we really want is someone who has a little bit of general programming experience and demonstrated problem solving skills). Almost every candidate has had a Master's degree and only one of them showed anything resembling actual programming ability.
Also, I hate dishonest resumes. If you put something on there, I will ask you
I see your problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Translation: "Why can't I pay fresh college graduate rates for someone who does the job of an experienced sysadmin?"
Reason: because fresh college graduates are not experienced, since douchebags like you collectively refuse to hire anyone who doesn't have four years experience in everything.
And to be honest, it kind of makes sense from their perspective - they could hire a guy fresh out of college, invest a couple of years in training him, and then watch him fly away to a better position somewhere else. For some reason, people just don't stick around when their skills grow, but their position and compensation doesn't! How weird!
Employee retention? Internal promotions? What's this madness you speak of?
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Why companies like to keep salaries secret:
It's cheaper to pay higher to poach one person than to give everyone a raise.
Even if that one person isn't as good as existing employees, the company may need that additional person badly so has to pay higher in order to get that person to switch jobs.
Whereas most of the people already in the company aren't in the
Re: (Score:3)
I'd have an even worse translation for you: Why can't they teach the college kids the technology du jour so they can be used right now. We'll simply throw them away when the next technology comes around and expect a new batch of fully trained college kids. And they're cheaper too! It's so win-win...
Re: (Score:3)
My pet peeve is that companies are terribly reluctant to promote anyone, internally. If you want to go from Tech Support to Technician, you probably have to change companies to do so. And not because one has much higher standards than the other, but just because they seem to assume the people they hire will be better than the people they have, even when they're promoting them to a higher job f
Stop require CS degrees for all positions... (Score:4, Insightful)
If they would stop requiring CS degrees the problem would get better. They require the degree when it is not really required for the particular job they are hiring for. Of course some folks graduating from privately run IT training programs have relevant education, but the vast majority of CS degrees are fundamental math and theory. They don't train people to be IT workers, they train them to be programmers and theoreticians. Good IT workers have experience. Experience is not something school gives, especially in this field.
we need more tech / trade IT schools they can have (Score:2)
we need more tech / trade IT schools they can have better IT class work with less of the big university filler.
Re: (Score:3)
Ugh. I've tried recruiting employees from the local 2 year colleges, but what do they teach? Game programming. What the hell? There's a ton of good jobs for people that can write C# web apps pushing data in and out of a business data base. All it would take is a 2 year program that teaches web development, c#, sql, and business processes. That business process part is really important too. Your program specs are going to look like gibberish to you if you don't have a basic understanding of accounting
Re: (Score:3)
Ugh. I've tried recruiting employees from the local 2 year colleges, but what do they teach? Game programming. What the hell?
That must mean game programming has now crashed. After the "multimedia cdrom" crash in the 90s, they set up a program for that. Then after the dot com crash they set up the "web designer" program. I suspect in a couple years we'll be seeing a "myspace social media technician" program.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
I got bored with math courses and went across campus to the School of Business for an Information Systems degree. At the time, it had more programming classes than the CS department and the rest was business management, accounting, marketing, communication, etc. It really prepared me for working in the real world more than the pure math and theory of the CS program.
I know I missed out on some of the advanced theory, but I code up the same old b
Re: (Score:2)
Education vs. Training (Score:5, Informative)
Universities are not trade schools. Employers who are expecting any new employee to be instantly productive are deluded.
Last week I interviewed a candidate with a Masters degree and 20 years of experience in the industry. We'll probably hire her, but we figure that she could be productive in three months and won't be worried if she takes six [1].
[1] That's net. In other words, she'll be doing useful work fairly soon, but by the time she's 100% up to speed we'll have invested three to six months of her terminal productivity getting her oriented, etc.
"essential skills required to run IT departments" (Score:2)
IBM expects programmers coming out of college to act like experienced managers? That sounds pretty silly to me. As for having the skills "ready to go", you come out of university with a degree. You still need experience and seasoning. This whole thing is nonsense.
What a waste of electrons... (Score:5, Insightful)
Some of the skills they are asking for are reasonable:
OK, fair enough. A CS program from which you can graduate without knowing programming in some language is pretty useless.
Some are less reasonable:
Sorry guys, while a graduate should have some basics in this area, you really need real world experience to develop these skills to a useful extent. Or possibly an advanced degree in which the student studied real systems.
And some are just too vague to figure out what they want:
Database skills? You want them to know how to design a database using nth normal form? The basics of SQL syntax? How ISAM works? How to use Oracle Forms? It's not enough to say "database skills". The other one is even more vague.
The list of "hard to fill" positions is pretty useless, too. Love the one about the security clearance... of course it's hard to fill, the only people with active clearances are those who are working or very recently were working on a job which required one. You want an employee with a security clearance, stop being cheap bastards and hire someone you can get cleared. New grads are probably easier here; less time for them to accumulate skeletons in their closet.
Re:What a waste of electrons... (Score:4, Insightful)
People who can solve problems and grow from the experience are exactly that kind of workers you'd like to have. It doesn't matter if they don't know everything when they start, but they're willing and able to tackle issues that they've never experienced before. Anyone who's unable to do this is going to be the first sorry sod replaced by computers, robots, etc. as they're just the functional equivalent and a lot more expensive to keep around.
On a general note, of course employers always want more. In a down economy where jobs are tight, they can even expect to get a little more than they usually would. Some of it's just HR pie-in-the-sky requirements, but that doesn't mean all of it is unrealistic. If a job lists problem solving skills, make sure to be ready to give an example of how you've solved a problem during the interview.
Re: (Score:3)
while(capitalist != knowledge) graduates == null (Score:3, Funny)
IT should have apprenticeship like other trades yo (Score:2)
IT should have apprenticeship like other trades you don't see plumbers needing 4 years just in a class room to get a job.
The old university systems is not a good fit for the IT field.
Re: (Score:3)
Half the problem is that the 'higher education' 4-year-degree has two years of uselessness at the front-end: generals, followed by entry-level IT/CS courses that anyone getting into the field should probably at least have a basic grasp on, already.
The best way, IMO, to get 'schooled' in IT would probably be a year and off, alternating, for 5 years. You decide to do IT, so you go to a year of intensive generals - tutalage on the OSI model, 1-2 different kinds of programming languages (eg. C/C++ for the 'fund
They want trade-school gradutates. (Score:2)
Not university graduates.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Heh, I'd never read that. Interesting, since I'd wager 90%+ of all IT work is in no way more academic than mechanical arts or skilled trades.
Hell, most programming isn't a ton different from plumbing. Send water (user input) to one place, fetch other water from hot water heater (database) and send it to the sink (screen). Requires about as much creativity. In both cases talented or experienced workers will produce better results than others, and in both cases a big fuckup can result in a mound of shit w
Start at 14 and code code code (Score:5, Insightful)
I can only speak to programming but we should be exposing kids in middle school to all of the different languages and let them go to town if it is something that they like. Summer interning in High School would probably lead to a direct hire on graduation and they can get their degree on the company's dime. At the very least they will be three or four years ahead of any other graduate when they are out looking for work.
On a final note I can say definitely that no cares about a college degree if you have the required experience.
Corporate Serfs or Educated Citizens? (Score:3, Insightful)
You know what I want to see more of? Shop class. (Score:3)
I think everyone should be required to take a year of shop class in high school and learn to use basic power tools. It really pisses me off when I hire someone and they can't even use a simple tool like a drill. Latest example: we hired a kid who's still in school doing some kind IT background. About a week and half ago I asked him to hang up some coat hooks in the office. It didn't get done, it didn't get done, and then this morning I get an email that says something like, "I tried to do it, but I don't know how and I think you'll be better." Alright kids, putting a drywall anchor in a wall and screwing in a coat hook ain't rocket science.
That which does not follow.... (Score:3)
I suggest replacing IT with Construction and replace 'hang some coat hooks' with 'replace a hard drive' ?
Will the result be any better?
Re: (Score:3)
Have you ever helped rack servers? Guess what, there's a lot of trash that needs to be taken out.
Unless you're in a huge company where everything you do is so routine, and happens with such a high volume that there are "server room trash removal" specialists, the job falls to whoever is nearby.
Some companies make every job extremely specialized. O
Contrary to This (Score:3)
So– Managers of businesses are complaining that these college graduates aren't well prepared for the workplace, yet why do they seem to hold onto the notion that any high school kid can do the work they are asking of these professionals? Or at least, they seem to insist on paying their professional IT staff like they were only high school graduates.
I did some work with one company where the CEO brought in his fourteen-year-old son to build the company's web site. Later, he dragged in the IT staff on the carpet and gave them a forty-minute long tongue lashing because the web site wasn't working. There was no javascript menus, the purchasing system was non-existent. He complained that it looked amateurish! They all walked out on him after his tirade was complete. I guess it is needless to say that the company no longer exists.
The real problem (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
I've taken database classes and I've programmed websites to interact with databases.
However, it's been a long time since I've actually written any SQL. My current employer would flip out if I did, we hired pure Database people for a reason.
So, would I fail your test? Because I'm unable to spew out SQL statements on command?
Re:Article is dead on (Score:5, Insightful)
The point of a degree isn't to learn language X, then language Y, then language Z so that five years later their training is useless because things have moved on to language A, lanugage B, and langugage C. The point is to learn how a RDMS works, so you can pick up whatever particular flavor a given shop is using quick as well as easily move on to whatever "the next big thing is". The problem here is that you're expecting the university to make up for the fact your company has no training budget even if it causes long term damage to their students careers. You should be asking questions like: "Given a particular problem description, show me how you'd develop a properly normalized set of relations to capture the database". That's where the value is. Figuring out how to translate that table schema into whatever syntax your database tool uses is relatively trivial once that happens.
Re: (Score:2)
Reasonably smart kids may aim for a college degree. Smart kids also know that it provides them with the means to quickly learn applications of it in their field of engineering, the same way getting a driver's license means you are ready to get experience with real life driving. Reasonably smart businesses know that too and invest on getting smart kids
Pointless; industry has to join the real world (Score:3)
I for one am sick of industry claiming reality and claiming the academic world is out of touch! Different perspectives of the same elephant but they think they can see the whole beast.... managers often seem to have this misconception on a wide range of ... actually I'd say this false reasoning and possible arrogance is a defining characteristic for management (I've yet to meet somebody who proves otherwise; other people seem to repeat similar complaints...)
There is so much specialization which changes FAS